Google Launches Buzz Widget For Android
March 19, 2010
Google has released a Google Buzz widget for Android phones aimed at making it easier for users to update their status and share content with others.
The Google Buzz widget allows users to post text and photos with a single tap, directly from the Android home screen.
The Google Mobile Blog provides more details. "Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted."
"You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait."
The widget is currently available in English for Android phones running 1.6 and later. Google says it plans to add support for other languages soon.
Search for Google Buzz in the Android Market to download the widget. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap "Menu" while on the home screen and select "Add > Widgets > Google Buzz".
YouTube Expands Auto-Captioning Program
March 5, 2010
Whether they're used for the benefit of the hard of hearing, people who speak a different language, or just folks who want to watch videos while at work or in a library, captions can be helpful in all sorts of circumstances. And now, captions should become much more common, as all YouTube users will be able to take advantage of an auto-caption tool.
This tool is designed to work on all English-language clips that have relatively decent audio. A "request processing" button will be available for content creators who want to minimize a processing delay, and after the English caption has been created, they'll have the option to translate it into any of about 50 languages.
Interesting, right? Popular, too, if YouTube's predictions prove correct (see the graph below).
The one slight catch (aside from the English-only and audio quality restrictions touched on earlier) relates to accuracy; YouTube's making no guarantees that its captions will be perfect. But content creators will have the option of editing the captions, so this is hardly a dealbreaker.
A YouTube representative assured WebProNews in an email, "This is an exciting moment for us and represents a culmination of 3 years of work at Google and YouTube. Auto-Captions for everyone represents one of the largest projects of its kind and will open up millions of YouTube videos to deaf and hard-of-hearing."
Google Sets Target For Real-Time Translator Phones
February 8, 2010
If you think about it, it'd be slightly inaccurate to say that phones let people all over the world communicate with each other; current tech just transmits sounds, not their significance. But Google's looking to knock down language barriers with devices that will perform translations on the fly.
This isn't some poorly sourced rumor or random conspiracy theory. Chris Gourlay interviewed Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, and Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time."
Incredible as that might seem, the building blocks are already in place. Android allows users to perform searches by just saying terms out loud. Google Translate deals in 52 languages at the moment. Google only needs to integrate everything in order to be in business. Maybe.
The sentence "I am going to eat lunch at 12:30" becomes "I'm going to lunch at 12:30" after Google Translate takes it from English to Spanish and back. That's enough of a difference to create confusion (suppose someone's trying to distinguish between stuffing his face and stepping out to run errands), and it's not like Spanish is a rare dialect or the original phrase represents a curveball.
Toss in imperfect speech recognition, and it's hard to imagine anyone trying to conduct important business or even chat for fun.
Nonetheless, it should be very interesting to see how this project works out for Google.
Have You Read This?
> Google Analytics, Chromium Receive Language Upgrades
> Google Announces Unicode Progress
> Google Launches New Transliteration Tool
Gmail Search Becomes More Like Google Search
February 3, 2010
Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab is simply called Google search. However, it didn't provide all of the features that the real Google search does. They have now taken steps to improve the feature's capabilities in the following areas:
- Dictionary definitions
- Spelling corrections
- Calculations
- Local results
- Weather
- News
You can now enter "define" and a word in the search box to retrieve a definition. If you spell something wrong, it will ask you if you meant something else. If you type in a math expression, you'll get the calculation. You can search for a specific place or for things near a specific place and get map results (although Google said this feature will become available in a few weeks). It will also show you the More Info link, which will take you to a place page.
You can type "weather" followed by your city and state (or country) or zip code and get local weather results not unlike what you would get in a regular Google search. If your query matches something in the news, you may get some news results.
The new features are available in all languages that Gmail supports. They have also added a search button to the toolbar when you compose a message. With this, you can select text, click the button, and it will search for that. If you don't select text, it will just bring up a search box.
Have You Read This?
> Gmail and Picasa Storage Can Be Used for Any File
> Gmail Switches to Default Https Encryption Following Attack
> Google Adds Way to Easily Merge Duplicate Contacts in Gmail
